I'm definitely rooting for Rivos on this one. I have former colleagues at Rivos, but also apple is a litigious bully. It's also super hypocritical of apple - it was totally ok for them to go after recruiting talent from the likes of Qualcomm etc when they were building up their hardware.

IANAL so I don't fully understand the legal merits of this case. That said between Nuvia and Rivos it seems like the pattern is pretty clear: if you want to eventually try to do your own chip design startup, don't work at Apple.

How is this news to anyone?

Steve Jobs once contacted Eric Schmidt directly when one of his engineers (1!) was approached by a 3rd party recruitment company working for Google.